Saturday, October 11, 2014

Mocavo reveals new Census Viewer

Less than four months ago, we joined the Findmypast family to revolutionize the genealogy industry. In that time, we have continued to provide groundbreaking access to millions of records, books, and databases that hold the clues to your ancestors’ stories.

And we’ve only just begun.

Today we could not be more excited to announce the first feature innovation created by the combined Mocavo/Findmypast team. Transform your census research experience with the new Mocavo Census Viewer!

The new feature is only available to Mocavo.com Gold members. This means that even though you can search the entire website's content for free without a subscription, these features are only part of the subscription package. This is consistent with many other websites that are implementing "premium" features for a subscription fee. Here is a screenshot of the search page where I begin a search for my Great-grandfather:

The first search did not produce any results when searching the entire census. Of course, I choose my Great-grandfather for the test because he appears in the 1860 through 1930 censuses. So, I try again by searching the 1920 U.S. Census. The search page is more advanced on searching a specific year of the U.S. Census. However, my question at this point is if you know all the stuff in all the fields, why are you looking for the U.S. Census record, but that is another issue entirely. Here is the longer form:

After modifying the search and changing the year to 1930, I finally found my Great-grandfather:

After clicking on his name (which wasn't obvious), I got an expanded view of the entry:

I then clicked on the U.S. Census image and got the following:

At this point the image showed my search highlighted in blue and became interactive. Popup notices appear for every field and the colored markings help you navigate the page even when zoomed in. This part of the experience was extremely useful and showed high quality images with annotations that helped with a review of all the lines on the page. In addition, a scrolling list of the entire contents of the page appeared at the bottom.

This appears to be a very interesting innovation, but needs some improvement of the search function. Mocavo.com has been purchased by findmypast.com and we might see these same innovations move over to the findmypast.com website, I suppose.